David Halberstam (left) and Malcolm Browne (center) in DATELINE-SAIGON
Dateline-Saigon documents the efforts of five journalists to cover the Vietnam War in the face of a US government which did not want the facts to be told. The five were Malcolm Browne, Neil Sheehan, Horst Faas, David Halberstam and Peter Arnett, who amassed a bucket of Pulitzers between them.
What they found in Vietnam was that American policy was not working, because (among many factors) the Diem regime was alienating most of its own population, the South Vietnamese Army was less motivated to fight than the Viet Cong, and that Americans were more directly involved in combat than had been acknowledged. And the US government didn’t want any of this reported.
As Dateline-Saigon says, “When these patriotic journalists arrive in Vietnam, they had no idea they would become the enemy“, meaning the truth-wielding enemy of the US government propaganda. The reporters describe the government efforts to obscure, mislead, spin, hide and controvert the facts as a “vast lying machine” and the “Truth Suppressors”.
Quang Lien and Malcolm Browne (center) in DATELINE-SAIGON (AP Photo)
All television news viewers (especially a ten-year-old The Movie Gourmet) were shocked by the 1963 Buddhist monk’s self-immolation to protest the Diem regime in 1963. No one was more shocked than Browne, who was covering the Buddhist march, and, to his surprise and horror, had this unfold a few steps in front of him.
Sheehan is famous for uncovering the Pentagon Papers. Beginning with The Best and the Brightest, Halberstam banged out bestseller after bestseller on 20th century American history. Arnett went to cover dozens of conflicts interview Osama Bin-Laden and was a major media face of the Iraq War.
This is a Must See for students of journalism and of the Vietnam War Era of American History. You can stream Dateline-Saigon on iTunes.
Pierfrancesco Favino and Totò Riina in THE TRAITOR, Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
Mafia movies have long been a cinematic staple and two current films explore the original Sicilian Mafia, the Cosa Nostra. The true life epic The Traitor and the documentary Shooting the Mafia cover the same territory – the Cosa Nostra‘s utter domination of Sicily until prosecuting judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellini convicted almost 400 mafiosi in the bizarre Maxi Trial in 1986-87, the Mafia War on the State and assassination of the judges, leading to public outrage and arrests which have somewhat tamed the Cosa Nostra. Both films even feature the real village of Corleone, the home village of the fictional Godfather.
Pierfrancesco Favino in THE TRAITOR, Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
The Traitor chronicles the career of Tommaso Buscetta, a mafia figure who traded in billions of dollars worth of heroin. Then, an internal gangland power grab led to the murders of his sons and to his arrest by very harsh Brazilian authorities. Buscetta retaliated by turning state’s evidence and testifying against his former Mafiosi, becoming the first and most important Sicilian Cosa Nostra informer.
The Traitor opens at a Mafia party where Buscetta (Pierfrancesco Favino) is sniffing out betrayal by his colleagues. It’s poker wisdom that, if you can’t spot the player who is :”the fish”, then it’s you. Or, as Victor Mature said in Gambling House, “You know what I think, Willie? I think I’m the fall guy.”
Written and directed by Marco Bellocchio, The Traitor is a two-and-a-half hour epic that spans decades and three continents. The highlight is the Maxi Trial, held in a super-secure fortified arnea, ringed by over 400 defendants caged around the top.
Pierfrancesco Favino is very, very good as Buscetta, a guy who is firmly devoted to his personal code. Luigi Lo Cascio from The Best of Youth also appears as a Buscetta friend.
Letizia Battaglia in SHOOTING THE MAFIA
The documentary Shooting the Mafia introduces us to Letizia Battaglia, a talented Palermo photographer, whose photojournalistic specialty became photographing murder victims – scores, perhaps hundreds of corpses, bullet-riddled and bomb-mangled, in pools of blood. Her work also documented the grief. trauma and outrage of the Sicilian population.
Battaglia is open and unapologetic about her lusty personal appetites – and she over-shares. She would be an interesting subject for a biodoc even if she photographed ears of corn.
A Letizia Battaglia photograph in SHOOTING THE MAFIA
Shooting the Mafia, an Irish and US production, is directed by Kim Longinotto.
The Traitor can be rented from all the major streaming services. Shooting the Mafia can be streamed on iTunes, YouTube and Google Play.
The superb documentary King in the Wilderness follows Martin Luther King, Jr., through his turbulent final two years. Although King had already become an icon, he was facing the challenges of a new political and societal landscape that King himself had helped create. And he was foundering.
King’s approach, which overcame the overt cultural racism and statutory segregation in the South, was not working against the de facto segregation and urban riots in the North. Nor was King gaining traction to expand the movement against bigotry into a movement against poverty.
His leadership in the Black community was being usurped by younger, more militant, leaders. Stokely Carmichael and his peers were quick to discard longtime White Civil Rights workers and to alienate White America with a message of Black Power, which resonated in the Black community. King refused to use the weaponized term, while trying to hang on to his base.
King was under pressure to make public his opposition to the Vietnam War. King’s strong anti-militarism came naturally from his study of Gandhi and his commitment to non-violence. But campaigning against the War would be seen as a betrayal by King’s most effective ally and benefactor, President Lyndon B. Johnson. King was genuinely grateful to LBJ, and LBJ was famously vindictive.
King was just off the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the two greatest legislative Civil Rights victories since the 13th Amendment prohibiting slavery one hundred years before. In King in the Wilderness, it’s only a year later, and Martin Luther King, Jr. is facing a big fat case of What Have You Done For Me Lately?
It’s easy for us to forget just how young King was:
He was only 26 when he led the Birmingham Bus Boycott.
King wrote the Letter from Birmingham Jail and led the the March on Washington at 34.
He won the Nobel Peace Prize at 35.
He led the march from Selma to Montgomery at 36.
After a great historic victory, it can be difficult to find a new objective. It’s hard to gain political power, and it can be just as hard to keep it. It’s difficult for a public figure to remain relevant in changing times. These are the challenges of leadership.
By focusing on this period of King’s life and career, director Peter Kunhardt and writer Chris Chuang have made an inspired choice. They have also sourced it brilliantly, with the remembrances of King intimates, most notably Andrew Young and Henry Belafonte, along with Stokely Carmichael’s fellow SNCC leader Cleveland Sellers. King family confidante Xernona Clayton bookends the movie with the two most poignant anecdotes.
King in the Wilderness was originally aired on HBO and won an Emmy for best historical documentary. It’s now widely available on streaming platforms.
Christopher Plummer and Diane Ladd in THE LAST FULL MEASURE
The Last Full Measure tells the true story of a slain military hero who, due to the efforts of those who survived the battle, finally get a deserved Congressional Medal of Honor decades after his death. It’s a pedestrian movie periodically enlivened by excellent supporting performances.
The Last Full Measure is set in 2000, 32 years after the battle, when a selfish Pentagon career-climber (Sebastian Stan) is stuck with the unwanted assignment of validating the act of valor (it ain’t going to help him advance his career). He bitterly visits geezer after geezer to find out why the medal is deserved and why it wasn’t awarded earlier.
I’m not convinced that Sebastian Stan brings anything to non-action movies, and his parts of the film drag (which is bad, because he’s the main character).
Remarkably, the supporting cast of William Hurt, Christopher Plummer, Diane Ladd, Samuel L. Jackson, Amy Madigan, Peter Fonda and Ed Harris have combined for two acting Oscars and sixteen nominations. Christopher Plummer ia absolutrly radiant here; it’s some of his best work. Peter Fonda, in his final movie, also gives an indelible performance. Amy Madigan’s part is perfect matched to Madigan’s piercing eyes. And every Social Security-eligible actor is very, very good.
The battle scenes in the flashback are well-crafted, and Jeremy Irvine is very good as the hero. But this won’t make any list of top 20 Vietnam War films.
If you must watch The Last Full Measure, which is available on most of the streaming platforms, just fast forward until you see somebody old.
Mads Brügger’s eccentric and irresistible documentary Cold Case Hammarskjöld purports to solve a historical mystery. In 1961, Secretary-General of the United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld was flying to cease-fire negotiations near the Congo-Rhodesia border when his plane crashed, killing all aboard. There has never been a satisfactory explanation of why or how the plane crashed.
Danish filmmaker Brügger enlists the Swedish private investigator Göran Björkdahl, who has been researching the Hammarskjöld crash, and heads off to Africa in search of witnesses and clues. Björkdahl is dead serious. Brügger is, well, entertaining. With an ironic wink at the audience, Brügger begins by equipping the two with pith helmets for their African exploration.
The two come across a very plausible conspiracy that the Hammarskjöld plane was targeted. And, as they move among the shady world of South African reactionaries, they encounter an even more shocking conspiracy theory. But Brügger is a story-teller, not a historian; fortunately, he doesn’t have to deliver a smoking gun.
Idiosyncratically, Brügger chooses to narrate his film by dictating the “script” to two African secretaries. Midway, he admits that what really drives him is the excuse to hop around Africa talking to aged fixers and mercenaries. And it’s a rich collection of scoundrels that he finds, some revealing old secrets, some covering them up and some apparently spinning wild tales.
That’s the fun of Cold Case Hammarskjöld, now available from all the usual streaming services.
Coming up tomorrow night on Turner Classic Movies, a masterful director and his charismatic star ignite the war-end thriller Ashes and Diamonds, set amidst war-end treachery. It’s one of my Overlooked Noir.
It’s the end of WW II and the Red Army has almost completely liberated Poland from the Nazis. The future governance of Poland is now up in the air, and the Polish resistance can now stop killing Germans and start wrestling for control. Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski) is a young but experienced soldier in the Resistance. His commanders assign him to assassinate a communist leader.
Maciek is very good at targeted killing, but he’s weary of it. As he wants out, he finds love. But his commander is insisting on this one last hit.
This is Zbigniew Cybulski’s movie. Often compared to James Dean, Cybulski emanates electricity and unpredictability, Unusual for a leading man, he often wore glasses in his screen roles. He had only been screen acting for four years when he made Ashes and Diamonds. Cybulski died nine years later when hit by a train at age forty,
Zbigniew Cybulski in ASHES AND DIAMONDS
Andrzej Wajda fills the movie with striking visuals, such as viewing Maciek’s love interest, the waitress Krystyna (Ewa Krzyzewska), alone amidst the detritus of last night’s party, through billows of cigarette smoke. Wajda’s triumphant signature is, literally, fireworks at the climax; the juxtaposition of the celebratory fireworks with Maciek’s emotional crisis is unforgettable.
Ewa Krzyzewska in ASHES AND DIAMONDS
Wajda adapted a famous 1948 Polish novel into this 1958 movie. In the adaptation, the filmmaker changed the emphasis from one character to another.
Ashes and Diamonds was the third feature for Andrzej Wajda, who became a seminal Polish filmmaker and received an honorary Oscar. US audiences may remember his 1983 art house hit Danton with Gerard Depardieu.
TCM will be preceding Ashes and Diamonds with the documentary Wadja by Wadja, which I haven’t seen, but I will be recording. Ashes and Diamonds can be streamed from Amazon and iTunes. It was featured at the 2020 Noir City film festival.
Charlie Hunnam in THE LOST CITY OF Z
photo courtesy of SFFILM
Because the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM) was supposed to be underway now (it’s been cancelled for the COVID-19 emergency), here’s a film from SFFILM’s 2017 program. In auteur James Gray’s sweeping turn of the 20th Century epic The Lost City of Z, a stiff-upper-lip type British military officer becomes the first European to probe into the deepest heart of unmapped Amazonia. Finding his way through the lush jungles, braving encounters with sometimes cannibalistic indigenous warriors, he becomes obsessed with finding the lost city of an ancient civilization. I know this sounds like Indiana Jones, but it’s based on the real life of Percy Fawcett as chronicled in the recent book Lost City of Z by David Grann.
The Lost City of Z begins with an Edwardian stag hunt
through the verdant Irish countryside, complete with horses spilling
riders. This scene is gorgeous, but its point is to introduce the young
British military officer Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) as a man of
unusual resourcefulness, talent and, above all, drive. Despite his
abilities, he has been chaffing at the unattractive assignments that
have precluded his career advancement. In the snobby Edwardian military,
he has been in disfavor because his dissolute father had stained the
family name. One of Fawcett’s commanders says, “He’s been rather
unfortunate in his choice of ancestors”.
That yearning to earn the recognition that he believes he merits –
and to attain the accomplishments of a Great Man – is the core of this
character-driven movie. Fawcett resists yet another assignment away from
the career-making action, a mapping expedition designed to have a minor
diplomatic payoff. But it takes him on a spectacular Amazon exploration
that brings him celebrity – and backing for more high-profile
expeditions. Fawcett was surfing the zeitgeist in the age of his
contemporaries Roald Amundsen (South Pole), Robert Peary (North Pole)
and Howard Carter (King Tut).
In that first expedition, Fawcett becomes convinced that he can find the magnificent city of a lost civilization deep in the Amazon, a city he calls Z (which is pronounced as the British “Zed”). The Lost City of Z takes us through two more Amazonian expeditions, sandwiched around Fawcett’s WW I service in the hellish Battle of the Somme. That final expedition ends mysteriously – and not well.
No one knows for sure what happened to Fawcett. In The Lost City of Z,
Gray leads us toward the most likely conclusion, the one embraced by
Grann’s book. If you’re interested in the decades of speculation about
Fawcett’s fate, there’s a good outline on Percy Fawcett’s Wikipedia page.
Fawcett comes with his own Victorian upper class prejudices, but he
has the capacity to set those aside for a post-Darwin open-mindedness.
Gray made it a point that the indigenous peoples in the movie are
independent of Fawcett; Gray shows them living their lives in a world
that Fawcett has found, not just advancing the plot points in Fawcett’s
quest. Four real tribes – and their cultures – are shown in the film.
As Percy Fawcett, with his oft-manic obsession and fame-seeking that
color his scientific curiosity and his old-fashioned Dudley Do-Right
values, Charlie Hunnam gives a tremendous, perhaps carer breakthrough,
performance. He’s been a promising actor in Sons of Anarchy and the overlooked thriller Deadfall) (and such a good actor that I never dreamed that he’s really British). Hunnam will next star as the title character in the King Arthur movie franchise.
Robert Pattinson is unexpectedly perfect as Fawcett’s travel buddy Henry Costin. With his Twilight dreaminess hidden behind a Smith Brothers beard, Pattinson projects a lean manliness. It’s probably his best performance.
Sienna Miller shines as Fawcett’s proto-feminist wife Nina. I first
noticed Miller (and Daniel Craig) in the underrated neo-noir thriller
2004 Layer Cake. Now Miller is still only 35 years old and has delivered other fine recent performances in Foxcatcher, American Sniper and (in an especially delicious role) High-Rise.
Director James Gray (The Yard, Two Lovers, The Immigrant) is
a favorite of cinephiles and of other filmmakers, but regular audiences
don’t turn out for his movies. That may change with The Lost City of Z,
a remarkably beautiful film that Gray shot, bucking the trend to
digital, in 35 mm. The jungle scenes were filmed in a national park in
Columbia. The cinemeatographer is the Oscar-nominated Darius Khondji.
Khondji shot The Immigrant for Gray and has been the DP of choice for David Fincher (Se7en) Alan Parker (Evita), Michael Haneke (Amour), and Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris).
Along with the stag hunt and the voyages up and down the jungle rivers,
there is also a breathtakingly beautiful ballroom scene and a gaspingly
surreal nighttime discovery of a rubber plantation’s opera house deep
in the jungle.
There have been other Lost Expedition movies, most famously Werner Herzog’s Aquirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo. The Lost City of Z
shares an obsession, a quest and a mysterious tragic end with those
films, but it stands apart with its exploration of the motivation of a
real life character and the authenticity of Gray’s depiction of the
indigenous people.
Movie studios used to make an entire genre of very fun movies from Gunga Din and The Four Feathers through Lawrence of Arabia and Zulu
that featured white Europeans getting their thrills in exotic third
world playgrounds. We often cringe at the racist premises and the
treatment of “the natives” those movies today. Since the 1960s, the best
examples of the genre, like Raiders of the Lost Ark, have had an ironic tinge. With The Lost City of Z, James Gray loses both the racism and the irony, and brings us brings a straight-ahead exploration tale.
The Lost City of Z revives the genre of the historical
adventure epic, with all the spectacle of a swashbuckler, while braiding
in modern sensitivities and a psychological portrait. This is a
beautiful and thoughtful film. The Lost City of Z is available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Also see my notes from the director James Gray’s Q & A at the San Francisco International Film Festival. [And here are some completely random tidbits. There’s a cameo by Spaghetti Western star Franco Nero. And the closing credits recognize the “data wrangler”.]
Refusing to play it safe, director Francisco Meirelles elevates The Two Popes from would have been a satisfying acting showcase into a thought-provoker. The Two Popes is based on the transition of the papacy from the reactionary German Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) to the tolerant, social justice advocate Argentine Bergoglio (Pope Francis).
Of course, we expect great performances from two of our greatest screen actors, Anthony Hopkins (as Ratzinger) and Jonathan Pryce (Bergoglio). These guys are great, especially Hopkins, who has the task of making us see the humanity in a cold, humorless, doctrinaire character.
The story is a natural odd couple match-up set in a moment of historical drama, and, with Pryce and Hopkins, that would be enough for most filmmakers. But Meirelles takes it up a notch with an unexpected second flashback to Bergoglio’s career as a Jesuit leader during the brutal Argentine coup in the 1970’s. I didn’t se this coming, and it illuminates Bergoglio’s experience, more complicated than initially apparent. Credit the construction and the added complexity to Meirelles (City of God) screenwriter Anthony McCarten (Darkest Hour The Theory of Everything).
BTW The Two Popes is shot in the Vatican, including the Sistine Chapel, and the papal summer getaway, Castel Gandolfo. Way cool.
Lyndon B. Johnson, one of American history’s larger-than-life characters, finally comes alive on the screen in the HBO movie All the Way. Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad, Trumbo) is the first actor who captures LBJ in all his facets – a man who was boring and square on television but frenetic, forceful and ever-dominating in person. All the Way traces the first year in LBJ’s presidency, when he ended official racial segregation in America with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
LBJ was obsessed with gaining and keeping political power, and he was utterly ruthless and amoral about the means to do that. His tools of persuasion included deceit, flattery, threats, promised benefits and horse-trading. He was equally comfortable in playing to someone’s ideals and better nature as well to one’s vanity or venality. In All the Way, we see one classic moment of what was called “the Johnson treatment”, when LBJ looms over Senator Everett Dirksen, and it becomes inevitable that Dirksen is going to be cajoled, intimidated or bought off and ultimately give LBJ what he wants.
LBJ was so notoriously insincere that one of the joys of All the Way is watching LBJ tell completely inconsistent stories to the both sides of the Civil Right battle. Both the Civil Rights proponents (Hubert Humphrey and Martin Luther King, Jr.) and the opponents (the Southern Senators led by Richard Russell) must determine whether LBJ is lying and to whom. Each of them must make this calculation and then bet his own cause on his perception of LBJ’s real intentions.
But LBJ amassed power for two reasons – he needed to have it and he needed to do something with it. Along with the LBJ’s unattractive personal selfishness and the political sausage-making that some may find distasteful, All the Way shows that Johnson did have two core beliefs that drove his political goals – revulsion in equal parts to discrimination and poverty. We hear references to the childhood poverty that led to the humiliation of his father, to the plight of the Mexican schoolchildren in Cotulla, Texas, that he mentored as a young man, and his outrage at the discriminatory treatment suffered by his African-American cook Zephyr.
Bryan Cranston brilliantly brings us the complete LBJ – crude, conniving, thin-skinned, intimidating and politically masterful. Besides Cranston’s, we also see superb performances by Melissa Leo as Ladybird, Anthony Mackie as MLK, Bradley Whitford as Hubert Humphrey and Frank Langella as Richard Russell.
All the Way is remarkably historically accurate. It does capsulize some characters and events, but the overall depiction of 1964 in US history is essentially truthful. As did Selma, All the Way drills down to secondary characters like James Eastland and Bob Moses. We also see the would-be scandal involving LBJ’s chief of staff Walter Jenkins, a story that has receded from the popular culture. Vietnam is alluded to with a reference to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which is fitting since Vietnam grew to become LBJ’s nemesis and the national obsession only after the 1964 election.
All the Way was adapted from a Broadway play for which Cranston won a Tony. LBJ’s 1964 makes for a stirring story, and All the Way is a compelling film. You can stream it from HBO GO, Amazon’s HBO Now, iTunes, YouTube and Google Play.
Cynthia Erivo in HARRIET. Photo courtesy of Focus Features.
I first watched the trailer for Harriet askance because the Harriet Tubman action figure I saw on-screen didn’t resemble the tiny, revered Tubman in the sepia photos. But that is because of my own skepticism of Hollywood history and my own woeful ignorance of the historic Tubman. The ancient lady in her photos and the historic Tubman are explained in this fine NYT piece Harriet Tubman Facts and Myths: How the Movie Tried to Get it Right. As Harriet’s director Kasi Lemmons says in this NYT article, “You don’t have an image of what she was like when she was actually doing this work in her late 20s, when she was this young superheroine, this completely badass woman.”
Harriet is good history. The problem is that Lemmons doesn’t trust us to appreciate Tubman’s heroism when we see it – a 100-mile solo escape from slavery, guiding 75 escaped slaves to freedom with the Underground Railroad, leading troops into battle to free 700 more in the Civil War, and becoming a thought leader in the abolitionist and suffragist movements. So we have this swelling music every time Tubman does something inspirational. The constant, obvious beatification is distracting.
Tubman is played with convincing intensity by Cynthia Erivo. Erivo was absolutely the best thing about the Steve McQueen film Widows; since Erivo’s character teamed with those played by Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez and Elizabeth Debicki, the fact that she stole the movie is impressive. Erivo is a Broadway musical actress/singer, and Harriet uses her singing talent as well.
If you’re not expecting great cinema, you’ll appreciate this important and compelling history. Harriet makes it clear why Tubman belongs on the twenty dollar bill.
